Jorge Edwards

Jorge Edwards Valdés (Santiago, 1931 – Madrid, 2023) was a Chilean writer who worked across fiction, short stories, essays and reportage, while also serving for decades as a diplomat. He is often linked to the Latin American boom, through his friendships with several of its leading novelists during his years in Paris. Today he is remembered above all for his sharp, critical view of the politics of his time.

Born into a prominent Santiago family, he was educated by Jesuits at the Colegio San Ignacio, where he began writing, and later studied law at the Universidad de Chile. His first book of stories, El patio, appeared in 1952. He joined the diplomatic service in 1954, which took him to Princeton, Paris and, in 1971, to Havana as chargé d'affaires under Salvador Allende. That stay produced Persona non grata, a critical account of the Cuban government that made him internationally known and provoked a fierce debate among Latin American writers.

After the 1973 coup he went into exile in Barcelona, where he worked at the publisher Seix Barral. He returned to Chile in 1978 and took part in the defence of freedom of expression. Once democracy was restored he served as ambassador to UNESCO and, in 2010, as ambassador in Paris. His fiction concentrates on urban and middle-class settings rather than the rural themes common in Chilean writing, and treats family decline, the dictatorship and real figures such as Pablo Neruda and Michel de Montaigne.

His legacy lies in the way he turned the everyday life of the city and the contradictions of its elites into serious literature, a path still followed by later Chilean writers. He received Chile's National Prize for Literature in 1994 and the Cervantes Prize in 1999.